Savings Beyond Price™
Innovative Supply Savings and Quality Solutions That Work
by Strategic Value Analysis® in Healthcare
Did You Know...?
That Value Analysis Was Developed Back In the 1940's After World War II as a Way to Find Lower Cost but Higher Quality Alternative products and methods. This was Due to the Lack of Material Resources At The End of The War.
Savings Beyond Price -Weekly eNewsletter - Feb. 12, 2008
Robert T. Yokl
President & Chief Value Strategist
Greetings!
Removing a Thorn!
One obstacle I see Value Analysis, Lean, Service Excellence and Six Sigma teams facing every day is their reluctance to remove (or retire as I like to put it) a team member or even a team leader who is a “thorn” in the side of the whole team. These individuals consistently don’t show up for meetings, don’t do their homework, are naysayers, and put up roadblocks that slow your team’s progress. This behavior is akin to having a thorn in your side that needs to be removed.
Often this is easy to do! I remember a team coaching assignment recently where a team member hadn’t even started his project in six months, so his team leader decided to retire him from her team. When the team leader talked to the project manager about him stepping down from the team he couldn’t have been any happier about his retirement, because he said, “he was overwhelmed already by his primary job’s workload and never really had any extra time for his team’s project work”. This action by the team leader solved a thorny problem that could have festered for another six months.
The moral to this story is that sometimes it makes good sense to make big or little changes in your team’s lineup to avoid a total breakdown in your team’s morale, discipline and goal achievement. Even the best teams have this thorny challenge which needs to be addressed before it becomes an obstacle to realizing your team’s goals and objectives.
Your Partner In Savings Beyond Price!
Robert T. Yokl
President & Chief Value Strategist
P.S.This is just one of the hundreds of big ideas that I will be teaching you at our “Integrating Supply Six Sigma™ into the Healthcare Supply Chain 2-Day Workshop” on May 6th and 7th. So if you have been looking to move your team up to the next level of savings performance this is the workshop for you.
What Tools Do You Have In Your Quality and Savings Toolbox?
“You can never have enough of the right tools in your toolbox to get the job done”
In my garage I have a huge red multi-drawer toolbox on wheels that is chuck full of tools of every type and description to do handiwork around my house. But you know what? I always find that I never have enough of the right kind of tools in my toolbox to do my big and little jobs quicker, easier and better.
Just today I saw a new kind of magnetic tool wristband that fits on your wrist to hold your extra screws, bolts and nails while you do your handiwork so your hands are free to actually do the work. And you never drop or lose the fasteners you need to get your job done. This is a problem that has been driving me crazy for years (losing screws, bolts and nails just when I’m ready to use them). Now I can have a new tool that can fix this troublesome problem forever.
It’s the same with cost and quality management. If you don’t have the right cost and quality tools in your toolbox you will expend an enormous amount of unnecessary time and energy in: (i) defining your opportunities, (ii) measuring their relative size, (iii) analyzing their impact on your organization, (iv) improving your outcomes, and (v) controlling and holding your gains.
Do you have these tools? Here are seven basic cost and quality problem-solving tools that you must have in your toolbox. These tools will solve a vast majority of your challenges that you will face. The following is a list of the seven basic tools I recommend: (1) flowcharts, (2) cause and effect diagrams, (3) check sheets, (4) Pareto diagrams, (5) histograms, (6) control charts and, (7) scatter diagrams. Naturally, there are hundreds of more elaborate tools I could recommend that you will need from time to time to solve some of your major supply chain problems, but if you don’t have these seven basic tools in your toolbox you will never get to the root causes of your problems or never find the right solutions for them.
My point is this! Whether you are repairing a problem light fixture at your house or trying to identify the best savings opportunities with the highest ROIs in your supply chain, you need the right tools in your toolbox to get the job done right -- the first time. From my experience, your old tools won’t always get the job done. You will need to add new tools to your toolbox, like the seven basic tools I just mentioned, in order to ensure that you can attack almost every problem that you will ever encounter in your supply chain. That’s why you can never have enough tools in your toolbox to get your job done right!
Healthcare Lean Value AnalysisTM
March 19, 2008 - 1:00pm to 2:00pm EST
Energize and grow your value analysis programs while increasing your savings yields and dramatically improving your quality.
What You Will Learn:
Learn the difference between Lean Value Analysis and traditional value analysis and product evaluation techniques.
Learn the new skills that are required to be successful with Lean Value AnalysisTM in the years to come.
How to step up your quality processes inside your value analysis program while saving more in the long run.
How Lean and Six Sigma are perfect tools for the value analysis and supply chain practitioners to gain faster and better results.
How to develop your Lean Value Analysis ToolboxTM to pack more power into your value analysis teams and methods.
How to gain your managements' buy-in to the new Lean Value AnalysisTM concepts and practices to insure long term savings and quality improvement success.
March 19, 2008 - 1:00pm to 2:00pm EST
Webinar Leader - Robert T. Yokl, President/Chief Value Strategist Strategic Value Analysis in Healthcare
Sign Up Here click here
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3-Days to Achieve the Highest Level of Supply Savings and Value Analysis Leadership and Performance!
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PLUS as an added Bonus, we'll also send you our SPECIAL REPORT "Your Targeted Blueprint for Supply Savings Success!"
Subscribe Today!
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